Animation Analysis: "Fate/Grand Order - Memorial Movie 2023"

hey what's up everybody welcome back to another animation reaction and breakdown for those who don't know why I'm getting to this one of all things I put a poll up on my community Tab and this was definitely the most popular one so here we are getting to it uh I will be listening to the English version of this I'm not sure if there's going to be any copyright issues with that if there is my reaction portion may be muted that's just a heads up also for those of you who are probably new here because this is a new subject for me I don't really know fake Grand order all that much I don't know the Fate series too much I know it in like the grand scheme of being fate you can't get away from fate at the same time I've never watched fate so I don't really know what's going on with the lore but I'm here for animation not lore stuff so I'm gonna be focusing on that this whole time without further Ado let's get right to it shall we let's go jeez okay already I've known Fate has some really solid animation I've seen Clips around but oh this might be a very long video oh man okay God the attention to detail already it's insane cheese the 2D CG blend is hell I keep getting like stopped by a new shot there's so many cool things happening here I won't focus on all of these because we would literally be here for days um but I will focus on these really cool ones that I want to talk about because there's already been a number of them it's a beautiful song too if you can't hear it I apologize again but if you can beautiful song there's some really cool stylization going on with the art in this too I don't recall clips that I've seen of the series looking quite this textured in the line work and everything so I don't know if that's just a style for this video because there's definitely some stylistic differences between these different locations and shots oh man I'm sorry if anyone hates me talking so much but every single time I see something cool I want to say something but that's so consistent and so often in this video yo this is like a love letter to the history that these uh series were based on I think more than it is even the series itself this is there's a lot of historical stuff being shown I don't know any of the characters really not really by name I know who they're based off of roughly but that was very modern I never knew this to be a series that touched on more modern types of War [Music] but like I said I don't know much about this series foreign okay there's a lot to talk about there's so much to talk about I'm gonna have to cherry pick some stuff but uh let's get to it shall we all right so like I said I wanted to cherry pick some of these spots so I'm gonna have to skip by little things like this but I do like giving them highlights when I think that they're really well done and overall have a very nice aesthetic and a very smooth look to them I love the way that these frames were drawn so much detail so much love to them something that's kind of fun about this one is the fact that they're on different frames they're alternating frames they're both on twos but offset by one frame so you get that little separation in the style it kind of makes things feel a little bit more alive a little bit more tangible it's just this really nice you can obviously see the difference between the wine or drink of some sort and this like goblet cup thing that is being poured having offset timings on different parts adds secondary action to the animation and makes things just a little bit more lively and a separate mention for this skull being absolutely brilliantly handled this happens a few times with the way that they handle the light throughout this project but there is so much detail this is definitely something that is like done in the animation process these are within they're not like a post composite sort of thing where they add the lighting after the fact this is definitely handled at the same time where they draw everything probably on a piece of paper and then just Mark out where the Shadows are going to be and then digitally color it later that is a lot more effort and it just it looks so so vibrant it had so much character and so much time the amount of time you're spending on shots like that just to make a skull look cool for four seconds is immense so I've talked about CG water a lot recently on this channel doing animation breakdowns talking about especially the arc Knights animations they have a lot of attention on their CG water that they put into those projects and some of it looks insanely realistic this doesn't really look so much realistic as it does Fantastical this water has a really cool viscous thick kind of look to it and I think that's really unique especially since it is fantasy that they're pushing this sort of aesthetic I like that because the boat is also in CG and so is the light they decided to add this reflection down here they didn't really have to do that but I guess they figured since they were doing the boat and the water it would be stupid not to and they aren't wrong it's a good addition to do and I'm glad they did it the fact that the characters are still 2D actually surprises me you would figure with all this CG you might as well put in some CG characters but these actually seem to be 2D drawings that they had composited in on top of it which again considering the whole shot otherwise and the background were CG the fact that they decided to put the characters in 2D is kind of interesting to me and of course not a second later we get to the next spot I wanted to talk about this hand is really cool it's done in Road scoping from what I can tell it seems to be just footage of a person who is acting this out putting their hand down into a cup and picking it up that way and then they animate it over it or at very least use the footage as a very heavy reference because of how much detail on the rotations this hand has the fingers overlapping perfectly it looks a little surreal because it looks so real even though it seems to be 2D it's a very common tactic to use rotoscoping especially more recently in the anime scene because it saves so much time and it offers this sort of pseudo-realistic kind of energy to every movement because it is but rotoscoping is definitely a technique that is honestly undersung and a lot of people just assume it's CG because of how clean it looks but a lot of the time this isn't even CG this could be it could be a CG hand that was animated to match a real hand and then it was just given textures and some looks like to be some sketchy overlays because this all looks to be hand drawn not so much texture but it can be really hard to tell sometimes because especially these days where techniques have gotten so good and so creative this could be a CG hand with these lines on it that look like they're hand drawn could also be CG or AI generated even but I believe that this is probably hand-drawn lines over top of a rotoscoped hand and as per usual I at least have one spot of minor critique I want to mention this I will give a pass because it is bulk animation but these horses are not animated well horses are like traditionally especially in anime one of the hardest animals people seem to have drawing and making sure their emotions look correct it is a difficult animal and I am not trying to minimize that at all but these horses land on two feet at the same time and that's very uncommon especially for gallops you usually don't see them landing on the same side like the this one seems to be doing here it's like little things like this and of course all these horses in the back kind of all on the same frame there's no staggering between their animation so it looks a little bit janky but again horses are for some reason one of the hardest animals that especially anime has to do all you need to do is look up the one famous scene from Spice and Wolf to know what I'm talking about there they don't always get handled properly and in this sequence while they're handled better especially in the foreground they definitely try there's still some mechanic issues in how they land and where their feet stay that just aren't quite up to Snuff you know what I mean but again letting it slide just wanted to talk about it this shot with the Reflections in the eyes and the glasses it looks really really neat this amount of effort put into a shot of just somebody looking at a book in order to show you the book using the reflection of the glasses that is so unique I don't think I've seen that in many projects especially of something smaller scale like this you may see this in more of like anime film level of effort but usually not in smaller projects like this where there's usually not this much time to spend but from what I've seen in the rest of this video they spent a lot of time giving every shot they could as much love as they could and little details like this to show what the characters are doing through glasses is super unique it's such a great compositing concept I almost went by this but I love this spot here too where it uses this branch and these leaves as a transitional moment in order to switch the next shot here and you have that branch in the foreground another great visual lead I love those when they really pay attention to what's happening sequentially and they try to mesh them together to make it feel a little bit more organic when they trade from shot to shot this type of thing is super cool to me and it's just one of those nerd out moments I have when I see it done I am terrified of this armor I think that this is all 2D in which I respond to how do you have the time to put in this much effort to getting all of these intricate designs and Reflections looking so on point look at how ornate these spots are and like like all of this all of you know how long that takes it takes so long dude so long I can't believe they did this in 2D it doesn't look like CG I could be incorrect there I always put in disclaimers just in case I'm wrong because I'm not a perfect person but there's so much ornate detail on this how did they give people enough time to put in all of that detail that's so many individual lines to keep track of this probably took somebody months if it was all 2D and just drawn you know that's so much effort hats off to the person who handled this shot or people probably they probably had one person per character looking at how complex it is this is another shot really cool with the whole 2D CG blend they're utilizing that field and CG and having everything on a certain planar distance moving towards the characters and animating them on top of it and kind of placing the characters in like especially the guards up here you can see them in front of some of these different paths so they probably had to put these in in different layers like this chunk of the background here is probably a different 3D render from the one that's here that's in front of him and they just had to keep doing that if they weren't entirely separate renders of the same motion just split out they may have put them onto a separate layer underneath with no grass it's hard to tell since I'm not sure if it's exactly a multi-render version or if it's a simple masking method either way looks brilliant and it is a very clever way to use CG environments in a place that it could have taken them so much longer to do this imagine having to do every single one of these pieces of wheatgrass all on your own no thank you so it's a great use of that and a great time saver and they did it very well and respected the area around them and utilized all of that space to what they could and also as I talked about earlier with using heavy reference or maybe even rotoscope I believe this shot was probably more of a heavy reference they had some of the animators take a camera record from behind them and just mind out this sequence the way that the character rotates is a little too on point to just be done raw by hand with no level of reference and the way that the uh the cape kind of folds and where it folds how the fabric feels is extremely accurate and I feel like they were probably wearing a costume themselves when they filmed this in order to get that sensation in order to replicate that level of intricacy on the physics of the shot which is something like I said been done a lot more recently in the anime scene my dress up darling even have been doing stuff like that and utilizing a lot of heavy reference in order to do shots like this that kind of need a little bit more physics in order to make it feel right the lighting on this shot that's all I really want to say the lighting is gorgeous the way that it highlights so aggressive lovely on like every surface that needs a highlight but with a unique color in order to sell that much more depth in the hair the face even the glasses have this different shade from this it's not the same shade and I mentioned this earlier too the the texture on these lines is so real it has such a life to it I feel like they probably just used a textured brush digitally to do that but whatever brush they used they kept it consistent and it feels so organic it makes everything feel a little bit more like it's on a page like you're reading it from a book rather than you're watching an anime on a screen it's a really cool aesthetic choice and I'm glad they made it this is another character I had to double back on to make sure that the ornate detail on their jewelry wasn't just CG because that's becoming more popular in order to save time too either using masking methods to place a just straight up extra plane into a space in order to make it feel like it's all one unique piece or using CG to make the jewelry entirely all this detail on the Jewel on the front especially but also the stuff on the side it's all consistent and definitely hand drawn it makes me wonder if maybe they're using a CG model as a reference and kind of tracing over it to give it that overall look but I'm not sure but like even the background these pillars on either side are hand drawn in 2D and are just placed in layers on top of each other and panned out as the camera follows through and that's just you could have done that in CG but for some reason they didn't and that's so interesting to me how much effort they're putting into making something look more CG and more 3D but are still doing the art itself in 2D it's baffling to me so as I said earlier about that skull in the beginning this kind of happens again they really do pay attention to the lighting on this skull every little Ridge they add a lot of different flecks and everything here these little minute details and offshoots that they keep throwing in in order to make it feel a little bit more gritty and realistic I appreciate that this one isn't nearly as like aggressive but it's still very much paid attention to and they really did put effort into getting every Ridge to feel like it's popping out at you a little bit more this head rotation this whole body rotation that goes between this shot and the following shot I'm not entirely sure if this was assisted with CG it almost looks like it is with how the head moves but it could have just been some very attentive 2D animators could have been a reference like I have said before it's but look how smooth all that is usually when you see that level of smoothness it is CG based so you'd have something like the body with no details just animated in CG and then they had a 2d artist go in later and basically draw the entire character over top of it and the effects animation on whatever this is all this like liquid going on here so intricate I'm not surprised it only lasts a couple of frames because that probably took somebody a couple days couple weeks even just the amount of detail on this is insane and I'm not even halfway through this video yet I mean for real their color choices though I'm not sure how many of these are going to make it in here because there's so many cool shots but look at this color palette that's so cool the contrast of the Blues and the Reds that's so ideal and the detail on this explosion look at that impact frame just went full negative colors that's so neat I love how pretty this looks they put so much effort into this why did they put so much effort into this God it looks cool look at all these what are what are these these like eye looking things like biblically accurate explosions what are these this is superb lighting look at all this room light look at how much attention is on that Rim light that's so many frames that's so much Rim light that probably took so many days like there's so much there's so much to talk about and this transition here keeping that rotation bringing it around in this like Battlefield with all these CG swords on top of this hill it's just it's so cool I the lighting on this hand is stupid complex these flowers are stupid complex the art on this one shot lasts barely a second is so cool how much time they put into every little tiny highlight and different level of the hands the texture of the hand they highlighted every little lump every corner every imperfection that is amazing amounts of d detail for something that is there for barely a second shots like these are really cool for people like me who don't really know the source material but in this one shot I can see a character that's battle worn tired maybe looking back on their past decisions with a little bit of regret not being entirely positive on the decisions they've made and just the the Everlasting reality the the weight of their decisions I don't entirely know how accurate I am on that guess here but I'm I'm feeling some emotional weight in this shot just this sequence as a whole is really cool for that and I appreciate it when they do stuff like that when all these other shots that have this beautiful overall artistic Edge and they're all unique and they all look beautiful and then there's shots like this that strip down so much detail and put in just what you need to see and that's really cool to me this shot is really cool to me too purely for the sake that I do understand what's happening here this is definitely Excalibur it's got to be and the fact that it's showing all these Seasons all this growth happening over time it being overgrown that level of Storytelling just in a quick one-off shot like they've been doing this whole time and this shot I had a huge visceral reaction to when I saw it because you see all these different types of Warriors over many generations in different parts of the world the narrative Artistry that's being implanted in here in different little spots little injections of it like this one just showing the whole War has always been the same and it will always have the same result of death and destruction these types of things are really Universal thoughts and when they put them into a project like this it makes even those who don't know the series and don't know what it feels like makes it kind of resonate is like okay this isn't just a series about Etc characters this is a series about war and the politics surrounding it and it goes a lot deep deeper basically and I've been waiting for this shot because this one's really neat for me I love how they kept changing the art style of the hand there's a bunch of different types of Textures in here things like this one that has some writing on it and like this one that has some drawings and it's showing a bunch of different cultures and generations and just like I said in the prior shots these sorts of narrative choices are what make projects like this go from some simple anime thing to something that everybody can learn something from or understand just by watching it and back on shots like this where they have all of this ornate detail on the armor this could have and probably is more of an example of maybe having a CG render of this and then drawing over top of it or adding some filters to make it look a little bit more real but it does feel hand-drawn and if it is again why you could have done it a little bit easier been a little nicer on yourselves but this sort of reflection that's happening on the back half here I'm pretty sure is a compositing method where they basically placed this other layer on here they probably set it to a different blending mode for example something that's a little bit easier to handle because it doesn't look like it is uh deforming with the uh corners of the armor like it would be if it was CG which is what makes me believe this whole shot could just be 2D and it's just some people spending way too much time on it but I appreciate it when that happens I love seeing all this effort put into 2D work as a 2d animator myself I like shots like this where they treat CG as a tool and not as an excuse to not have to draw it shots like this are perfect for using CG and I know the whole using CG and Anime is kind of a hot button topic but there are definitely times where it is necessary to use it and shots like this where you're trying to make a character fly through the air and have a bunch of rocks flying at them there's no reason to draw all those you know just ucg it's it's things like that where you can find a reason to be like okay I get it so after looking into this shot a little bit more watching it back and forth I think that the prior shot I talked about him on where I was saying it could have been a heavy rotoscope used off of a reference this character model is very likely CG there's some things in here that look very like kind of like how berserk 2016 handled their models which isn't a bad way I want that to be clear it was just the animation quality that was a little shuffling on that but their models overall were very well done and that studio has done a lot of good work since but this sort of character model where they basically have the CG model and then they texture it to make it look a little bit more 2D you kind of get this cell-shaded look to it and it's it's a little bit easier to tell especially with things like that hand rotation the head rotation this flick here you can really see these details in the character that make it feel like it would actually be a CG model and not a 2d drawing just based on where the placements and everything are in the hand it looks a little bit more precise a little less imperfect like a lot of 2D would be the best artist on Earth don't draw things perfectly to anatomical spec whereas shots like this are almost too perfect to not be CG I'm not going to talk too much on the techniques or anything here I just really like this sequence I think the pull-in is really clean the transition through the eye using all these colors as a burst transition just chef's kiss on the overall technique Choice there the decision to do that was a very good one I really like that and there was my breakdown I know there was a lot more I wanted to get to and I'm sure I'll leave some of that on The Cutting Room floor when I'm editing this but there is so much to talk about nerd out about and I have to kind of like pull myself in and control my videos otherwise they would be an hour plus long this recording alone is already hitting 45 minutes of me just talking about this anime nation which is a lot more than my average breakdown is just because there was so much to talk about so honestly if you want me to get more detailed about this one let me know and maybe I'll do a live stream where I talk about this entire video more because there is more I could say and more detail I could buckle down into and really get into the meat and bones of it so with that said thank you all so very much for watching if you want to see that please let me know and if you want to stick around and follow me and support me you know how to do that I will see you all in the next video [Music] 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Channel: Catharsis

Views: 21,512

Keywords: music, drum, CatharsisDrums, drums, drummer, reaction, reacts, review, reactor, animation, animator

Id: IpiTnQaWj7Q

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023